>>> Joanna <123hop at comcast.net> 01/06/2008 6:06 PM >>>
Doug wrote
>
> I hear this sort of thing a lot and I'm not sure what it means. In
> 1974, second-wave feminism was still pretty young, and the level of
> gender consciousness was extremely low. Organized labor was largely
> the domain of grumpy, socially conservative white guys. Those with
> "identity" issues - basically everyone who wasn't one of those grumpy
> white guys - had something real to complain about.
The three things that have had the greatest impact on my life have been
> While we're
> certainly not post-race or post-gender or any of those other fanciful
> features of ObamaWorld, levels of awareness now aren't as low. As Kim
> Moody said years ago, after all those "identity" struggles, we now
> have the capacity to do class right.
In theory, I guess.
> But we sure didn't when we
> thought of the "working class" as something unitary.
I don't know. Certainly the socialists/communists could have done better about how they treated women and what sort of priorities they considered important...But even in the pre-identity days, they did significantly better than anyone else. In fact, one might argue that they took the first step.
Joanna
^^^^^ CB: Also, Communist slogans like "Workers of all countries , unite" and "Black and white, unite and fight" , and concerns such as "the national question " and " the woman's question" were pre-identity politics.They were put forth , not because the working class was thought to be unitary, but because it was seen as not unitary, as diverse, and had to be united across its diversity to carry out its historic task. The diversity of the working class was recognized by Communists before the identity politics movement.
Did the identity politics movement frame itself as in this tradition that preceded it ? From what I can tell , the identity politics movement acted as if was the first to deal with these questions. That is what seems implied in Kim Moody's comment.